Word: bedstead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Apartment houses whose sides had been ripped out earlier in the day were now ravaged by flames. An old woman stood in front of the ruins of her home, a teakettle steaming on her stove but fire coming from the burning building. There was a skeleton on an iron bedstead nearby. She was dazed and poking in the hot ashes. Nearby a little boy was playing with a football -- all he had saved. The bodies of 14 horses were smoking and smelling in the street. Twenty feet from them were the bodies of ten people who had sought refuge...
Hijuelos, 37, author of 1985's Our House in the Last World, catches the rhythms and flavors of the streets, nightclubs and Latin family life. Castillo is all melody, by turns upbeat and melancholy. By age 60, his best performances on bandstand and bedstead behind him, he occupies a room in an East Harlem flop mockingly called the Hotel Splendour. There, his music out of style, his body failing, he thrives on memories of songs sung and women loved. Yet, as Hijuelos conveys with art and sympathy, the Mambo King is to be admired and envied...
...think, the President wondered. In the bedroom with its pennants and simple oak dresser, Reagan drifted back 60 years. "I read a book about Indians and started to build a tepee in here," he said. "Nelle vetoed that." Reagan rubbed a hand over a huge brass ball on the bedstead in his parents' room and recalled that he had taken one from the original bed frame, put it on a broomstick and used the contraption as a baton to lead the Y.M.C.A. band...
...next act, the emotional balance shifts completely. Marjorie may be viewed either as an avenging angel or a paranoid witch. She has trussed up Raul in the fireplace and pinned a white blindfold around his head. She has clamped the head of a brass bedstead in front so that the fireplace resembles a prisoner's cell or an animal's cage. She pokes Raul in the stomach and groin with a broomstick, pours ammonia on him pretending it is gasoline, and peppers him with matches, threatening to burn him to death...